Arms and the Women

by Reginald Hill

  ‘Oh yes. Powerful for or against evil, says Grigson. And he quotes from Hurlstone Jackson’s Celtic Miscellany a translation of a Gaelic incantation to accompany the plucking of yarrow. I have Jackson’s slightly modified 1971 version here. You read it, Ellie. It’s for a woman.’

  He handed her a Penguin paperback with his finger laid against the passage.

  Ellie read, hesitantly at first, but in a strengthening voice as the words caught her imagination.

  ‘I will pick the smooth yarrow that my figure may be more elegant, that my lips may be warmer, that my voice may be more cheerful; may my voice be like a sunbeam, may my lips be like the juice of the strawberries. May I be an island in the sea, may I be a hill on the land, may I be a star when the moon wanes, may I be a staff to the weak one: I shall wound every man, no man shall wound me.’

  The air seemed to grow heavier and warmer and more richly scented in the silence after she spoke and she felt close to fainting till Daphne broke the spell by saying, ‘That was really beautiful, Ellie. Patrick, why isn’t our garden full of yarrow?’

  ‘Because here it would be a weed,’ said Aldermann firmly.

  ‘But there’s a lot of it at Nosebleed, is there?’ said Ellie, recovering. ‘Indeed. But there’s a lot of it on most uncultivated ground. I expect the cottage got its name originally because some early occupant was a healer. Or a witch.’

  ‘Yes, but why call it Nosebleed – the plant, I mean?’ asked Ellie.

  ‘Grigson says if you put the leaves up your nose, they can make it bleed, which is a way of finding out if your love is true. Yarroway, yarroway, bear a white blow. If my love love me, my nose will bleed now.’

  Ellie thought, well, I shan’t need to try that, and smiled.

  Patrick smiled back, but made no irritating enquiry as to the source of her amusement. He was good at that, not at all pushy, content to let people – and things – come to him.

  Daphne said, ‘Nose-bleeding is a rather insensitive subject for you two to be going on about in view of my condition, don’t you think?’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Ellie. ‘But clearly I was never going to get any of this fascinating information from you. Thank you, Patrick.’

  Patrick said, ‘My pleasure. I don’t know why, but I assumed you would know all about the cottage, perhaps even have visited it.’

  Ellie said, ‘No, I know nothing about it, except that Daphne refers to it as the bothy, which makes it sound like some rural slum. I didn’t even realize till yesterday that in fact you bought it off my good friend, Feenie Macallum.’

  She said this to preempt any snidery about Feenie, though to the best of her recollection, she’d never heard Patrick Aldermann say anything unpleasant about anyone.

  Daphne snorted at the name and winced as her nose reacted badly.

  ‘Weren’t you about to make some point about the cottage before you got diverted, dear?’ she said.

  ‘Was I? Oh yes. I was going to say that, despite its distance, I believe the Axness area falls within the purlieu of the Mid-Yorkshire Force? In other words, if you did spend some time there, it would be no problem for Peter to maintain a supervisory programme?’

  ‘You mean, set someone to watch over me? Well, yes, I suppose so. But, Patrick, this is silly…’

  ‘Why?’ he said. ‘In view of what’s happened over the past two days, I’d be surprised if Peter hadn’t already considered the possibility of removing you and Rosie to a place of safety.’

  ‘Well, yes, he did say something, but –’

  ‘There you are then,’ said Aldermann who, despite his quiet and unassertive manner, was somehow very good at inserting his words into the apparently unbroken speech flows of other people. ‘And the fact that you’ve never been there before would make it even less likely that anyone could get a lead on where you’d gone, in the unlikely event that anyone should attempt to get such a lead, I mean.’

  ‘Perhaps, but I think you’re missing the point. Like I just said, it’s having me around that could be dangerous to Daphne.’

  ‘Forgive me, Ellie; not having you around Daphne is one thing – though I should point out it was your choice to visit us this morning –’

  He smiled the smile at her, but it didn’t take away the faint sting.

  ‘– but not having Daphne around you is quite another matter. I know you may find it surprising that in some matters I know my wife rather better than you know your friend, but what is preventing me from catching my plane today isn’t any suspicion that as soon as I leave, kamikaze terrorists will come spilling across the lawn, it’s the certainty that Daphne would be heading to your side as fast as she could, frightened you might enjoy the next episode of your adventure without her company.’

  He looked from Daphne to Ellie and back again. They were silent, whether from amazement or indignation they hadn’t yet made up their minds.

  ‘Therefore if I am to go to my conference, and I don’t disguise that missing it would be a blow, I should feel happier if the pair of you were safely stowed somewhere these people couldn’t possibly know about, under the aegis of a police escort, than I would be relying on any assurance my wife or indeed your good self might offer of avoiding each other’s company.’

  This was more packed with insults than a philanthropist’s Christmas pudding with silver threepennies.

  Ellie opened her mouth to spit out retaliation, but Daphne was quicker.

  ‘Oh good. That’s settled then,’ she said brightly. ‘Nosebleed, here we come. Ellie, darling, when can you be ready?’

  xviii

  the flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la!

  Kelly Cornelius lay in her hot foaming bath and closed her eyes.

  Through the open door she could hear her Gilbert and Sullivan compilation disc pulsing full blast out of the hi-fi. It had been playing almost continuously since she got home but so far none of her neighbours had complained. Possibly even the macho dickhead who occupied the flat above had been given pause by his awareness that she’d been accused of assaulting a police officer.

  ‘Taken from the county jail,’ she sang along. ‘By a set of curious chances…’

  As a precocious kid she’d used to mock her Hispanic/Hibernian father for his love of something so English as the Savoy Operas, but at times of stress this was the music which she could rely on to bring back his lean, smiling face and her sun-filled, love-filled childhood.

  ‘… liberated then on bail, on my own recognizances…’

  A musical bath had been the second most important thing on her mind when she got back to her flat after her unexpected release. The first had been to check that the hollow wooden light pull in her bathroom had not been touched, unscrew it, and do a couple of lines of the coke hidden there. She’d been pleased to discover how well she managed in custody without it. Not that it would have been hard to score in the remand centre where most things were on offer, but she’d been advised by experts, or at least by one expert, that your weaknesses were what both the screws and your fellow prisoners were looking for, so keep them hidden as long as you could. It had been a comfort to be able to confirm what she’d often asserted to herself, that she was still a long way from being an addict.

  But, Christ! it had been good to feel the jolt once more.

  Then straight into the bath to get the smell of the place off her. She topped it up with boiling hot water for the third time. She’d have to watch it or her skin would be going all puffy!

  She raised one arm out of the water and examined it for puffiness. No signs yet. She reached out her hand to the glass which stood on the stool beside the bath.

  ‘So bumpers – aye ever so many – And then if you will, many more! This wine doesn’t cost us a penny, Tho’ it’s Pommery seventy-four!’

  She emptied her glass and looked contemplatively at the bottle resting in the bidet. Just one more glass…? Better not. Coke high got you clear and sharp, but bubbly, delicious though it was, just got you pissed. Shame to waste
it though.

  She stood up in the bath, picked up the bottle, pressed her thumb over the top and shook it violently. Then, pointing it at her crotch, she removed her thumb and shrieked as the icy bubbling jet played on her hot pink flesh.

  Jesus! she thought. I should patent this!

  She squatted in the water for a moment to wash away the wine, then got out and walked out of the bathroom draped in a huge white towel. God knows what kind of surveillance they’d set up, but she saw no reason to give them a show.

  Dried and dressed, she put a large floppy sun hat on her head and went out of the flat, leaving the music blaring behind her.

  ‘The flowers that bloom in the Spring, tra-la,’ she sang as she ran down the stairs and out into the sunlight. ‘Breathe promise of merry sunshine…’

  On the steps she paused as if drinking in the fresh air of freedom. Which indeed she was, except she wasn’t sure if she was enjoying it with the compliments of that pair of suits who always turned up at her court hearings or whether that barrel of lard who’d rolled in instead of nice lean Mr Pascoe really was as incompetent as he appeared.

  Never mind. Calculation or cock-up, they were going to regret it.

  She headed for the town centre on a route which took her through Charter Park, the great expanse of open green space which was the city’s main lung. As she turned into the gate, the car which had been following her slowed down to permit its passenger to get out. He strolled through the gate after her while the car continued on its slow crawl around the one way system which circumscribed the park. She paused from time to time, to call encouragement to some children playing cricket, to exchange a few laughing words with an old lady feeding ducks on the canal, to sniff at the roses in the municipal flower beds. She was still singing ‘… we welcome the hope that they bring, tra-la, Of a summer of roses and wine…’ as she emerged at the other side of the park, stepping out onto the pavement almost coincidentally with the arrival of the kerb-crawling car.

  She spent the next hour wandering round the department stores, buying first of all a small haversack and then various odds and ends of clothing and make-up which she shoved into it. Finally she bought herself a huge ice cream cone with chocolate sauce, and with her long pink tongue burrowing into it like an aardvark at a termite tower, she retraced her steps into the park.

  The man on foot followed while the car continued on its long one way circle, moving even more slowly now that the late afternoon traffic was building up.

  A couple of hundred yards into the park on a slight raise and partially concealed by a small grove of trees was a public lavatory. Dumping the remnants of her cone into a wastebin, Kelly Cornelius went into the ladies. As she disappeared she was humming, ‘When constabulary duty’s to be done, to be done…’ The man found a bench to sit on from which he could observe the path leading up to the conveniences.

  He’d only been sitting thirty seconds or so when she reappeared.

  ‘Oh shit,’ he said.

  She was riding a bicycle.

  She came swooping down the track towards him, then did a wide loop across the hard baked grass to avoid getting too close. He began to run in an effort to cut her off but even though the bike looked pretty ancient and heavy, it moved fast downhill under the thrust of those elegant young legs, and his outstretched arm came nowhere near her, though he was close enough to hear her voice raised in song as she shot by.

  ‘… the policeman’s lot is not a happy one – happy one!’

  He pulled out a mobile phone and punched in numbers but she was out of the gate and weaving away along the pavement against the traffic flow long before the phone began to ring in the crawling car which was now a quarter of a mile away, bogged down in traffic and facing the wrong direction.

  ‘… the flowers that bloom in the Spring, tra-la, Breathe promise of merry sunshine…’

  xix

  pooh on the patio

  Ellie Pascoe had brought her laptop down from the room she refused to call a study to the kitchen. This was so that she could keep one eye on a gently simmering pan of ratatouille and the other on Rosie who was playing in the back garden.

  Ratatouille hardly needed an eye upon it, except that Ellie knew from experience that she was quite capable of forgetting all about it and redefining chargrilled vegetables. Rosie hardly needed an eye either, being totally absorbed with her two playmates, one (slightly worryingly) invisible, the other (very worryingly) not.

  Despite these demands on her attention and her care, she was able to let some sort of third eye which might have been the bliss of solitude if that was a condition enjoyable by those with ratatouille and children to worry about, check the scrolling screen for the point she’d reached in her revisions.

  There it was. First mention of Odysseus. She began to read and was instantly geminated, one of her personae experientially present in her imagined universe, the other peering into it god-like through the window of her computer. This second was a right carping cow, always finding something new to worry about. Literally, something new in this case. How could she justify putting expressions with a modern ring in the mouth of an ancient Greek, except of course as an easy route to a cheap laugh? Here for instance in the stranger’s reaction…

  ‘Odysseus, you say. Now him I have heard of. Right slippery customer from all accounts. Buy a used boat off him and you’d soon have a wet arse. Well, it takes all sorts to make a world, eh? So your lot lost this war then? That’s always the way, there’s got to be losers and winners. But I’m right glad you and your old father and these good-looking lads here all managed to come off safe and sound.’

  That bit about buying a used boat bothered her slightly, with its clear reference forward to modern car salesmen. Did this make it unusably anachronistic? On the whole she thought not. The phrase might ring modern, but it wasn’t really anachronistic either in content or in concept. The notion of sharp practice was as old as Homer himself. Wasn’t there a bit in the Iliad where a Greek warrior spares one of the Trojans he recognizes as a distant relative, then as token of their kinship offers to exchange armour with him, a noble-seeming gesture until the poet wryly points out that the Greek’s gear is a right load of old tin while the gullible Trojan’s is all bronze and gold?

  As to the objection that this didn’t sound like the way an ancient Greek would speak, well, of course it didn’t! For a start he’d be speaking in ancient Greek. And why that should have to be presented in some version of eighteenth-century poetic diction she couldn’t see. It struck her as being as daft as those movies where foreigners allegedly speaking in their own tongue are made to speak English with a foreign accent.

  Convinced by her own reasoning, she carried on.

  ‘Thank you for your concern,’ said Aeneas. ‘But you still have not answered my first question. Why did you address your supplications to me and not to my father?’

  The stranger leaned forward and spoke confidentially, as if he and the Prince were all alone.

  ‘Well, lord, of course, you’re dead right. In the normal way of things I’d have gone for the old gent. But in this case, he looked… if you’ll pardon me for saying it, lord, but you did ask… he looked so frail and weighed down, like he’s been through a lot of bad stuff and it’s all getting to be too much for him, and it didn’t seem fair to add to his burden.’

  ‘That was very considerate of you,’ said Aeneas.

  ‘Aye, mebbe it was. But I’ll be honest, there were a bit of self-interest there too. What I mean is, it seemed to me that while a word from you might be enough to stop any of these good-looking lads of yours from skewering me, I wasn’t so sure that they’d pay the same heed to your dad, not in the heat of the moment, I mean.’

  Aeneas said softly, ‘Be assured, any who didn’t would rapidly suffer an equal fate.’

  ‘Mebbe so. But a lot of good that would do me, lying there all stuck with spikes, like a hedgehog that’s been hit by a chariot.’

  The Prince nodded, as if ac
cepting the argument.

  ‘Now tell me your name and degree, of what family and fortune you come, from what region so remote that news of the great war at Troy hardly seems to have troubled you, and whether it is the vagaries of uncaring fortune or the just wrath of one of the great Olympians which have driven you in such a state of nakedness onto this inhospitable shore.’

  The Greek took a deep breath, then he smiled and slowly opened his arms wide like a patriarch inviting a troop of grandchildren to his embrace, and where before he had spoken as if he and Aeneas were all alone, now his tone and manner included everyone present in his audience.

  ‘Lord, my name is Nikos, and I was born on an island so small and out of the way nobody’s heard of it save them as lives there, and they call it Orkhis because of its shape. My family are fishermen, not poor, not rich, ’cos them things are relative and as we’re all fishermen on Orkhis and we take care of our own, poor or rich don’t come into it.’

  ‘No overlord then?’ interposed Aeneas.

  ‘Not on the island. Nowt there to warrant some great man like your lordship’s self building a stronghold and creating a fiefdom. Yet it’s hard in these troubled times to get by without the protection of belonging to someone or other, and we have long paid what humble tribute we can afford to Ithaca. Now here’s an interesting thing, lord. According to our rude historians, King Laertes once visited the island himself many years ago, and our ruder gossips say that on that visit he took a real shine to my ma who was a right bonny lass by all accounts, and a bit of a flirt, and the next year after his visit, she gave my father a manchild, me, which is why though I’m named Nikos after my old dad, my mates down the taverna usually call me Nothos, signifying bastard.’

  A ripple of amusement ran round the listeners.

  ‘You do not mind this signification?’ said Aeneas.